'All Our Names': Relationships at heart of melancholy tale

Friday

Feb 28, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 2, 2014 at 10:23 AM

In the early 1970s, a young man who calls himself Isaac emigrates on a student visa from Uganda to a small college town in the Midwest. There, Helen, a social worker in her late 20s who lives with her mother, is assigned to his case. She makes sure that he has a place to live, knows how to shop for food and other necessities, and can generally handle life in the United States.

Margaret Quamme, For The Columbus Dispatch

In the early 1970s, a young man who calls himself Isaac emigrates on a student visa from Uganda to a small college town in the Midwest. There, Helen, a social worker in her late 20s who lives with her mother, is assigned to his case. She makes sure that he has a place to live, knows how to shop for food and other necessities, and can generally handle life in the United States.

She does much more for him, and All Our Names is in part a story of the evolving relationship between the two.

The novel is told in alternating chapters titled Isaac and Helen. Helen tells her straightforward story — one of falling in love with someone who reveals very little about his past and dealing with the fact that, at this time and in this place, an interracial relationship is viewed with suspicion, if not contempt.

Isaac’s story, of his life in Africa, is more complicated. He starts out as an aspiring writer from a village in an unnamed country who goes to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, after Britain granted it independence, when hopes for a democratic Africa are high.

The man, who reveals neither his birth name nor his baptismal one, hangs out at the university, where he meets another young man who calls himself Isaac.

This Isaac is as interested in revolutionary politics as the other Isaac (who narrates) is in literature, and the two, both impoverished outsiders, form a bond. When the militant Isaac becomes involved with a wealthy would-be leader, a peaceful attempt at a revolution goes downhill fast.

Author Dinaw Mengestu, who grew up in Peoria, Ill., after his family emigrated from Ethiopia, keeps the setting and details vague: The novel is about the ways social forces interfere with the bonds between individuals, as well as the ways those bonds hold, even when frayed.

In what is often a somber, restrained narrative, Mengestu refrains from dwelling on the details of revolution and military takeover in Uganda, instead focusing on the changes in the two Isaacs — one of whom is drawn ever deeper into violence, while the other finds he can survive only by numbing his responses.

Thinking to record events, he says: “I tried to describe one of the bodies, but all I could see was death — no eyes, no face, just a blank emptiness I didn’t have the stomach to look at closely."

At the end of his personal war, what he is left with is “far from poetry, less than a journal, and worthless as history.”

The novel’s melancholy tone and blurred focus can become tiring: Hanging out with characters who feel as if any joy is a betrayal can be more of a trial than many readers might want to endure.

But the story of Helen and the two Isaacs, and the ways their longings mesh or don’t, has a subtle power that gets under the surface of events to explore the complexities of human relationships.